Jakarta. Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa said Thursday that he had no plans of injecting funds into private banks, even joking that BCA -- the country’s third-biggest lender by assets -- is already too rich.

Purbaya’s first major economic move since replacing respected minister Sri Mulyani was injecting Rp 200 trillion ($12 billion) into state banks to boost lending. Purbaya now plans to do the same thing with regional government-owned banks, starting with Bank Jakarta and East Java’s Bank Jatim. Asked whether private lenders could expect a similar liquidity injection soon, Purbaya admitted that he had no such thing in mind at the moment.

“BCA is already rich. We have no such plans for now,” Purbaya told the press on the margins of the 2025 Investor Daily Summit in Jakarta.   

The minister said that the transfer might not be necessary, citing that whatever funds transferred to state banks would likely end up in private lenders as people spent the borrowed money.

“The funds would eventually go to the private banks and into the economic system. And what I’ve done leads to bigger liquidity and a decline in interest rates, doesn’t it?”

The first round of the liquidity injection saw five state lenders -- all now under the sovereign fund Danantara -- getting a total of Rp 200 trillion once parked at the central bank. The distributions were as follows: BNI, BRI, Mandiri (Rp 55 trillion each); the mortgage bank BTN (Rp 25 trillion); and the sharia bank BSI (Rp 10 trillion). 

As of September, Mandiri had disbursed Rp 40.6 trillion as loans -- equivalent to around 74 percent of the funds. BRI’s loan disbursement reached Rp 33.9 trillion (62 percent), followed by BNI at Rp 27.6 trillion. BSI has lent Rp 5.5 trillion to its customers, meaning that the sharia bank has already hit the halfway mark. BTN, on the other hand, is still falling behind as its disbursement only stood at Rp 4.8 trillion or just 19 percent of the injection. In other words, all banks had disbursed at least 56 percent of the transferred funds so far.

“BTN is actually the ‘loudest’ of them all. They said they could reach 100 percent disbursement by December, but look here, they had only achieved 19 percent. … I expect [BTN] would only be able to disburse Rp 10 trillion until the year-end, so perhaps I would move the rest to other banks,” Purbaya said.

Mandiri and BRI still beat BCA asset-wise as of the first half of 2025. Mandiri boasts Rp 2.5 quadrillion in assets, the largest among banks. Followed by BRI (approximately Rp 2.1 quadrillion) and BCA (nearly Rp 1.5 quadrillion).

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